Wednesday, May 22, 2019

Leonardo DiCaprio: "I’ve been listening to podcasts about the history of Hollywood, the transition from silent films to talkies, the advent of television, the musicals in the sixties, the directors’ era of the seventies. And now we’re talking about streaming services. I don’t want to act as if I’ve been around since fucking silent cinema, but I see this as a huge shift in the way movies are going to get done, what gets financing. The studio system has tons of content, libraries of things that they can make movies of, but in a lot of ways they are hemorrhaging. They’ve become—much like in the twenties—these corporate empires that have taken over the artistic vein of moviemaking. We’re now in an era when there’s a flush of cash into streaming. But with an overflow of content, there’s a lot of garbage out there. Now I do see a lot of chances being taken for story lines, certainly documentaries, certainly giving some artists opportunities to make out-of-the-box story lines that I don’t think ten years ago would have been possible. But these types of films that Quentin is doing are also becoming endangered species."

Adam Silver: "Fifty percent of television households in this country are in the Eastern time zone. And so if your West Coast games start at 10:30 at night in the East, you’re invariably going to lose a lot of viewers around 11, 11:30. I mean, you can just chart it. You see how many television households turn off around 11:15, 11:30 at night, just because people have to get up for work in the morning.

I mean, it is something we can address. We’re talking about it. I mean, it would obviously be less convenient to those fans on the West Coast if we played even earlier. I mean, just think about people getting to those arenas after work if you start a game at 6 p.m. local time in the West. It’s not the most convenient thing. It’s not as convenient for a television watcher on the West coast, either. But when you look at the league from a national standpoint, it may make sense to play a little bit earlier in the West. And that’s something we’re going to talk to our teams about this summer."

"I didn’t do anything, ultimately, except lick my wounds. I did do other pilots after that, a pilot called “Starport,” a pilot called “The Survivors” – all shows that to this day, I think, ah, that would have been a great show. It would have been fun to work on that. So in some alternate world, maybe I became Joss Whedon or J. J. Abrams."

...

"So then I would go in and I would start cutting. I would combine characters and trim out giant battle scenes, make it produceable. Although the later drafts of those scripts were always more polished, because I’d revised them several times, my favorites were always the first drafts, which had all the good stuff in it which I had to take out because it was too expensive and too big. When I returned to prose, which had been my first love, in the 90s, I said I’m going to do something that is just as big as I want to do. I can have all the special effects I want. I can have a cast of characters that numbers in the hundreds. I can have giant battle scenes. Everything you can’t do in television and film, of course you can do in prose because you’re everything there. You’re the director, you’re the special effects coordinator, you’re the costume department, and you don’t have to worry about a budget.

Of course the irony of all this is the project that I thought most unlikely to ever be filmed – the project that was actually unfilmable – is now going to be this big show on HBO."

Sunday, May 12, 2019

"Can something move and remain the same? Can anything be replanted without changing the landscape?

No place tries like California, a mind-set as much as a place. California always leans toward reinvention. It is closer to the future than anywhere else. Nothing feels permanent, even without earthquakes and fires. So it is with the Warriors.

It is so California to come up with something cool and coveted, and at its peak try to lift it to something bigger and better, risking all that made it cool in the first place.

It is why In-N-Out Burger expanded to Texas, why Levi’s made Dockers, why skateboarding is joining the Olympics.

Will Apple, with origins in a suburban garage, ever be as loved as it was before it grew big enough to build a $5 billion headquarters that looks like a spaceship? Will the San Francisco skyline ever be as beautiful as it was before the Salesforce Tower rose like a middle finger to the city’s low-slung aesthetic, amid a rising fist of preening (and leaning) towers?"

"“One of the things that film does best is replicate vivid colors, holds their integrity,” Mathieson says. “If you have a poppy red, digital can go toward a British postbox red … Film can hold those colors a lot better than digital can. We had the freedom to go for a really weird purple, to find an interesting shade of blue.”"